Ralph Vaughan Williams loved Shakespeare, and it inspired his music throughout his long composing career.

This album is a collection of some of that music, much of it now heard for the first time.

In 1912 and 1913 Vaughan Williams composed and conducted music for Shakespeare plays in the Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, where Sir Frank Benson presented plays for many years. He composed some new music, but preferred to use music of Shakespeare's own time whenever possible. The album includes a Henry IV Suite assembled from the surviving cues by Malcolm Riley, and a Stratford Suite, put together from a number of plays by Nathaniel Lew.

Vaughan Williams wrote a Henry V Overture in 1913, but the full score has long since been lost. Twenty years later, he wrote an overture for brass with the same title, based on that 1913 overture, but it was developed in a completely different way. Some of the orchestral parts have survived at Stratford, and David Owen Norris was able to put the original version together for this recording. The comparison between the two versions is very interesting -the later version may be heard on ALBCD052 Vaughan Williams on Brass.

Nathaniel Lew has arranged a Richard II Concert Fantasy, using incidental music commissioned from Vaughan Williams by the BBC in 1944 but not used at the time.